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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

Kotlin Native Adds Objective-C Interop, WebAssembly Support

Kotlin/Native 0.4 makes it possible to build native apps for iOS and macOS, writes Nikolay Igotti, Kotlin/Native tech lead at JetBrains. Additionally, it introduces experimental support for the WebAssembly platform.

Objective-C interoperability is the key to Kotlin/Native supporting iOS/macOS development. JetBrains has gone so far as publishing a very simple demo app written in Kotlin both on the Apple Store and Google Play.

The magic is provided here by the new platform. libraries, which enable access to underlying operating system interfaces. This makes it also possible to use the POSIX OS layer on a platform that provides it, e.g., to call fopen, fread, and so on. Previously, interoperability with the underlying platform would require the explicit generation of interop stubs.

Another new feature, aimed to simplify the use of Kotlin objects with C API, is object pinning, which can be used to ensure an object is locked in memory when consumed from C APIs.

Kotlin/Native now supports WebAssembly, which means Kotlin can be used for browser-based apps. Support is only experimental, due to browser support limitations, says Igotti.

Kotlin/Native is a recent development in Kotlin that allows to compile Kotlin, originally a JVM-based language, to native binaries that run without any VM. This makes it especially suitable for platforms such as iOS and embedded targets, where VMs are not allowed or desirable. Kotlin/Native currently supports Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and WebAssembly.